Happy Turkey Day

Happy Thanksgiving from Jake the Wild Turkey!

Winter Preparations

First comes Halloween, then Thanksgiving, and before you know it there is two feet of snow on the ground. How do you prepare for winter? Do you put warm comforters on your bed, crank up the thermostat, or put on cozy sweaters? Our animals at the museum make their own preparations for the winter months.

Our snowshoe hares are some of our coolest winter creatures. As the weather turns cold, these hares gradually turn from a summer brown to a winter white! Their ears, feet, and entire bodies turn a snowball white, providing them with camouflage against winter’s snowy backdrop. More than just a defensive aid, the white fur provides better insulation. It lacks the pigment melanin and is slightly hollow, which allows for more air space within each hair and thus more insulation.

Snowshoe hares have another winter adaptation besides changing color. Their feet are so large relative to their body size that they actually spread out the force of their weight, letting them hop on top of the snow without falling through. It’s like they have their own built-in snowshoes!

Our other mammals change too. The foxes, bobcats, and raccoons grow thick, bushy coats to help them fight off the harsh winter cold and just about every animal puts on a few extra pounds as an extra layer of warmth. Many animals that live in cold climates develop a type of fat known as “brown” fat. The sole purpose of brown fat when used by the body is to produce heat.

If the animals still aren’t warm enough with all of these winter adaptations they can always cuddle. Our raccoons, bobcats, and otters can often be seen snuggling, sharing body heat. Come to the museum in the winter and maybe you’ll see three gray and black fuzzy lumps sharing a log or even two catlike faces with black-tufted ears staring back from inside their den.

Dylan Beach, CMNH Wildlife Specialist

Owls & Howls Kidcam

Creature Feature: Black Rat Snake

Meet Onyx, one of the museum's Black Rat Snakes:

Name Our New Barn Owl!

The CMNH Wildlife Resources department has a new male barn owl and you can help it name him! Follow this link to watch a video and cast your vote:

http://cmnh.org/site/AtTheMuseum/Wildlife/BarnOwl.aspx





He was hatched in captivity in April of this year and CMNH acquired him when he was just a couple of months old. The wildlife staff has been having a great time getting to know him this summer through his responses to enrichment and by glove training him for use in educational programs and live animal shows. He is not on display in one of the Perkins Wildlife Center exhibits, but he will frequently serve as an ambassador for his species in programs, classes, and outreach events. So be sure to keep an eye out for him and also help us choose his name!

Michelle Leighty, CMNH Wildlife Specialist

Birds, Beasts, Brats & Beer photos

Here are some photos from last night's event, taken by CMNH staff photographer Cory Molner (click images to enlarge).

bobcat training demo by Wildlife Specialists Nikki McClellan and Joe Dell'Anno:

CMNH Executive Director Dr. Evalyn Gates:

Wildlife Resources volunteer Peter Pesch with Tamarack the Great Horned Owl:

CMNH educator Nathan Taxel with Lightning the Red-tailed Boa:

Wildlife Specialist Michelle Leighty with male barn owl:

Wildlife Resources volunteer Claudia Bennett with iguana:

Birds, Beasts, Brats & Beer!

Tonight from 6 - 8:30 p.m. is an annual event developed by the Nature League which showcases the Ralph Perkins II Wildlife Center & Woods Garden and the creatures that inhabit it. Birds, Beasts, Brats & Beer is a casual evening with food, drinks, and entertainment in the form of live animal feeding, training, and enrichment demonstrations by the Wildlife Resources staff. Plan on seeing bobcat, fox, raccoon, and river otter demos as well as behind-the-scenes tours of the Raptor Center. Staff and trained volunteers will also be circulating with various birds of prey on gloves to invite intimate viewing opportunities. More information can be found here:

http://www.cmnh.org/product/SE075/BirdsBeastsBratsBeer.aspx


Come join in the fun!


Michelle Leighty, CMNH wildlife specialist

Spaulding's Stinky Towel

The gray fox Spaulding enjoyed rubbing all over the scented towel he received for enrichment this afternoon. Check out the video and watch him go!




Michelle Leighty, CMNH wildlife specialist

Wildlife Brown Bag!

The Wildlife Resources department will be presenting a brown bag seminar in Classroom B on Wednesday. All CMNH staff, volunteers, interns, and so on are encouraged to attend!

Michelle Leighty, CMNH wildlife specialist

Peregrine Falcon Banding

Last week, the three peregrine falcon chicks on the Terminal Tower were banded by the Ohio Division of Wildlife. The small metal band around each bird's leg assigns it a unique letter and number combination, and with this identification tool various aspects of the individual's life can be tracked and studied, including territoriality, migration, longevity, reproduction, and so on.

The young birds were also physically examined and blood samples were collected for a DNA database. And they received their names: Arrow (female), Dart (female), and Spike (male).

I was lucky enough to attend the banding ceremony and take some photographs (click images to enlarge).




Before the Ohio Division of Wildlife biologists opened the window to access the nest on the building ledge, a "drawbridge" was raised which prevented the chicks from backing away and falling off the edge to the pavement twelve floors below. The drawbridge can be seen in the next photo, which also pictures the chicks being returned to the nest.


And finally, the drawbridge was lowered and SW (a.k.a. "Mom") was reunited with her freshly banded young.



Michelle Leighty
CMNH wildlife specialist

Phone Book for a Fox

An extremely important part of the job of the CMNH wildlife specialists is to provide the animals living in the Perkins Wildlife Center with environmental and behavioral enrichment. Enrichment is any stimulus that captures an animal's interest and encourages healthy mental and physical activity. Enrichment comes in many forms, including (but certainly not limited to) scents, toys, novel items, training programs, varied feeding schedules, social interaction with humans and other animals, sounds, rearrangement of living spaces, and puzzles.

The wildlife staff strives to deliver engaging and effective enrichment to the animals on a daily basis. On a typical day, for instance, I may feed the otters their fish frozen inside of large ice blocks, give the raccoons food that has been hidden inside of boxes they must manipulate and open, train the bobcats to leap from platform to platfrom in their exhibit, play recordings of songbird vocalizations for the peregrine falcons, give an opossum-scented blanket to a fox, place a mirror inside of the crow enclosure, and fill a snake's tank with a novel substrate such as sand or shredded paper. The possibilities are numerous and the staff enjoys developing creative stimuli for our wildlife collection.

The primary goals of enrichment are to keep the animals mentally stimulated, encourage natural behaviors, increase physical activity, prevent neural disorders, and improve the overall quality of life of each individual.

Earlier today I took a short video of an example of enrichment for this blog. I presented Huxley the red fox with a phone book with some of his diet hidden inside. My goal was to encourage him to use his excellent sense of smell to detect the food, and also to encourage natural species-specific behaviors for a fox such as digging and tearing. Check out the video to see whether or not I was successful!








Michelle Leighty, CMNH Wildlife Specialist

2010 Terminal Tower Peregrine Falcons

Many peregrine falcons make their homes in large cities, nesting on man-made structures such as skyscrapers, bridges, and power plants. These constructions are comparable to the cliff ledges and mountains where non-urban peregrines build their shallow nests, or scrapes.

One of CMNH's many educational projects is the FalconCam, which provides photographic coverage of the peregrine falcon scrape on the Terminal Tower in downtown Cleveland.

At the time of this blog post, the pair at this nest site consists of a female known as SW and a male named Ranger. This is SW's ninth year at the Terminal Tower and Ranger's first!

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of visiting the site on a trip to install new cameras for the FalconCam. With my own camera I was able to snap some photos of the action!

When we arrived Ranger was sitting in the nest box (click photos to enlarge):




Wildlife Resources director Harvey Webster attached the new cameras to the building while SW kept a close watch:



Later SW perched near the scrape and allowed me to photograph her:



The falcon activity at the nest can be monitored online 24 hours per day on the FalconCam website, found here:

http://www.falconcam-cmnh.org

Springtime is a particularly exciting time to check in on the falcons, as often there are eggs to observe and then newly hatched chicks to enjoy!

Michelle Leighty, CMNH Wildlife Specialist

Second Annual Groundhog Sun-Day

Well it’s been three weeks since our second annual Groundhog Day Celebration and Eddie, our groundhog, is getting back to normal.

It was a long process getting our little hoggy ready for his big stage appearance. In early December the wildlife staff began preparing Eddie for his big day. Since I have the pleasure of being Eddie’s primary keeper I was glad for the opportunity to spend some extra time with him.

Twice a day for six weeks we worked on a variety of behaviors: target, station, scale, and kennel. These are the behaviors that Eddie would be demonstrating to the crowd in Murch Auditorium on Groundhog Sunday. The first three weeks of training we worked exclusively in the Animal Room, where Eddie resides. It was during these sessions that Eddie had free run of the Animal Room. He really seemed to enjoy exploring every nook and cranny and on more than one occasion his poor whiskers were so weighed down with the accumulation of cobwebs that he looked like a well-used mop.

For the following three weeks, fellow wildlife specialist Michelle and I took Eddie to the Auditorium to desensitize him to the stage and the acoustics of the room. Eddie, being a true showman at heart, did exceptionally well.

Attendance at the museum during our Groundhog celebration was just shy of 1000 visitors. There were plenty of activities for young and old alike: tunneling like a groundhog through a makeshift burrow, face painting, crafts and activities, story time, and live animal programs highlighting Ohio hibernators. But the main attraction was Eddie. During Eddie’s Auditorium debut, visitors were entertained as well as educated as to the wondrous ways of one of Ohio’s true hibernators. After the show visitors were invited on stage to get an up-close encounter with Eddie via a plexi-glass corral constructed just for this purpose.

It was a great day and I eagerly await next year’s Celebration. Until then we will let Eddie just sleep the rest of the winter away. Oh to be a Groundhog…

Danette Rushboldt
Wildlife Specialist